According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pinterest deal hasn't been finalized, and the Journal doesn't name potential investors. No billion-dollar club newbie, the San Francisco company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion last May, in a round led by Japanese ecommerce site Rakuten and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and FirstMark Capital.

Whether Pinterest's new valuation is a mark of the company's large potential, a still-hot market for the social media companies that rise above the fray or all around silliness, it's probably worth underlying what Sequoia Capital's Jim Goetz told the Times about the future ranks of billion-dollar startups: “A year from now that might be 100,” he said.

Your aspirational consumerism at work! (via Pinterest's "Popular" board)

AllThingsD's scoop about a new round of funding for Pinterest has now been confirmed. Rakuten, the largest ecommerce site in Japan, is leading a $100 million investment round in Pinterest at a $1.5 billion valuation, eclipsing Instagram's valuation by a cool half billion. Existing investors, including Andreeseen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, as well as previous angel investors, also participated.

If you're following along at home, that's an $800 million valuation bump in eight months for a company with no revenue yet to speak of. Last October, Pinterest was valued at just $200 million.

The synergy for the two companies is obvious: Pinterest gets a leg up in expanding into Japan, where Pinterest is "growing very fast," says Rakuten's CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, as well as the ecommerce giant's 17 other markets. But for Rakuten, the deal may be even sweeter. As TechCrunch reports, roughly 70 percent of Japan's Internet population (about 80 million people) have a Rakuten ID--the same kind of ID consumers here have with Apple or Amazon, that includes payment details. 

It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest: “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he says. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.” He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.” One other area, TechCrunch understands, is for users logged in with Rakuten IDs to pin images and then use those pins to buy items away from Pinterest, on Rakuten’s own Rakuten Ichiba site.

Unlike Instagram or Facebook, Pinterest has always had an easy relationship with commerce, and, in theory that could lead to monetization. Betabeat, for one, has already argued that for all it's "revolutionary" influence, the site functions not unlike a glorified choose-your-own-catalog.

But like the Draw Something, the beneficiary of another headline-grabbing valuation, Pinterest has also been losing daily active users, at least according to the numbers from AppData related to users that connect through Facebook. "So it better solve that problem," advises Business Insider. Good call, guys! Here's one solution. Traffic appears to have picked back up, right around the time The Next Web broke the story about an impending $1 billion valuation. Maybe that's the new user acquisition strategy in these bubblicious time?

via AppData

After the valuation news broke, techies on Twitter also weighed in with a hefty dose of skepticism, including AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, breaker of said valuation.

@missmelon @a99kitten they like insane in Silicon Valley — Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 17, 2012

@digiturner i do not judge them (i save that for later), i just report them!

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 17, 2012

Pinterest worth $1.5-billion in Valley's latest sky-high valuation vsb.li/DMS3Hc <-- I love @Pinterest, but really??

— Randy Thio (@ideabloke) May 17, 2012

What bubble?MT @lvanderpool: Crazy. RT @eric_andersen: Whoa @Pinterest worth $1.5 billion? After $100 million funding j.mp/Ji1b82

— Rodney Brown (@burly_adopter) May 17, 2012

via Huffington Post

Thre.ad, a New York City-based social network that lets users share street style through "threads" of photos, is in the process of raising a $760,000 debt round, according to the startup's amended Form D filing on FormDs.com.

As Thre.ad co-founder and CEO Mimi Nguyen explained to Betabeat by email, the social network lets users spot and tag photos with brands and styles and share it with the rest of the Thre.ad community.  "If Twitter and Instagram had a baby, it would be thre.ad!" Ms. Nguyen told the Huffington Post when the company launched in private beta in November.  Sounds more like democratizing The Sartorialist to us, with the idea of turning anyone with a smartphone into a style spotter.

When Thre.ad first filed a Form D in November, the company said it raised $450,000 out of  a $500,000 debt round from three investors. But the amended Form D points to increased interest from backers, with $560,000 raised from five investors so far toward that $760,000 round. Ms. Nguyen declined to name those five investors, but she did promise "major releases" from the company next week.

Thre.ad, which appears to still be in private beta, has two other co-founders: CTO Jonathan Rainey (a veteran of both Electronic Arts and Bookish) and Fashion Director Kristin Ming. The startup was also one of the co-sponsors of Raise Cache, a fashion show and event that raised more than $100,000 for hackNY.

A rather glowing review on the blog HyperVocal says "Thre.ad was founded upon the idea that individuals should feel free to express themselves without being judged."

Mimi and her team launched themselves miles ahead of competition the moment they ruled out the possibility of negative judgments or reactions in their product, subsequently broadening their base of potential users who will feel comfortable sharing. Instead, Thre.ad uses 9 positive and quirky “Fashion Reactions.” Based on the idea that each photo tells a story and each person interprets the story differently, viewers are allowed to choose up to three reactions per photo on how they feel about what is being expressed: “Cool!” “Want it!” and “Bananas,” are just a few!

To be fair to, say, Fashism, another New York fashion-tech startup that lets users get a "love it"/"hate it" judgment on photographs of outfits they voluntarily upload, honest feedback has a place in fashion too. Speaking of, can someone swing by The Observer offices and tell us if pearl earrings work with motorcycle boots?

chloe + isabel

Jewlery design and sales startup Chloe and Isabel has just raised a healthy $8.5 million Series A round led by General Catalyst.

This round follows on a  $3.25 million in a seed round which the company raised just this January. That round was led by First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, and angel investors including SV Angel Ron Conway, Founder Collectives’ Caterina Fake, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, The Consigliere’s Mike Duda, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, and Ashton Kutcher.

"We've been reading a lot about the series A crunch, so it was  exciting to share the good news," Lindsay Kaplan, their marketing director, told Betabeat by phone.

The young company has a interesting business model, which they describe thusly: "The brand conceives, designs and markets its own brand of lifetime-guaranteed fashion jewelry for users to sell, priced from $18 to $200. Chloe + Isabel is also building a platform that will power a user's own personal e-commerce experience. Users who sign up as Merchandisers receive a customized digital workplace to create their boutique shopping experience, and they earn 30 percent in commission from every sale. Merchandisers may participate in streaming video training, are able to curate personal collections of Chloe+Isabel jewelry on their online boutiques, and receive real-time trends, insights and recommendations to help support their businesses."

The startup also announced a new partnership with Refinery29 to recruit sellers on nine college campuses and showcase co-ed style on Refinery's website. "We're kind of like Avon, we provide the products, the girls do the selling and the social media," said Ms. Kaplan. "What we're focused on now is building out the digital dashboard we offer to them so that they can get they most out of the e-commerce business we're building together."